A study was published in Lancet Psychiatry yesterday that added to the evidence that exercise is good for one’s mental health. In this study, participants rated their mood nearly 1.5 days per month less if they exercised compared to similar people who didn’t exercise. Those who engaged in team sports, cycling and other exercise with durations of 45 min and frequencies of three to five times per week reported the best effects.

None of this is really new, but the study supports previous studies that show clear and definitive mental health benefits of regular exercise.

In a blog post from a few years ago about the dose-effect of exercise, I passed along the findings that nearly an hour of rigorous exercise, at least three times per week, can be as effective as antidepressant medication.

A newly published study notes that resistance exercise (such as lifting weights) can be useful in reducing depressive symptoms regardless of the intensity, duration or frequency of the workouts. So, go out and pump some iron to strengthen your resistance from depression! Even short, infrequent or not very rigorous workouts are helpful.

An interesting study was recently presented at the ApA conference: there is now limited testing available to determine which SSRI or SNRI antidepressant medication is more likely to work for you based upon your genetics. The study was funded by the testing company, but is worth looking into for more information. Hopefully this will prevent the “hit or miss” experimental approach of selecting antidepressants based upon side-effect profiles, and waiting 2-6 weeks to find out if the clinical guess was a good one or not. The article is on Medscape (you might need to register for a free account to access it).

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics just put out a report about the increasing use of antidepressants. As a psychologist (as opposed to a psychiatrist), I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, there have been many studies that have demonstrated the superior or at least matched efficacy of psychotherapy over medication to treat depression and anxiety, so I find this trend concerning. But on the other hand, when I recommend that some of my patients should consider consulting with their primary care provider or a psychiatrist and they express concerns about stigma, weakness or other reasons not to consider this treatment option, I attempt to reassure them that “antidepressants are one of the three most commonly used therapeutic drug classes in the United States” according to the report, and thus they should not feel self-conscious about taking such medications.

The report noted that there has been a progressive increase in antidepressant use since 1999, and that during the time of the study, nearly 13% of people over the age of 12 in the US have reported taking antidepressants in the past month. Women take antidepressants at double the rate of men. A quarter of those who reported using antidepressants have taken them for at least ten years.

It’s reassuring that those who need to take medication are in good company, but it is important to explore non-medical treatment of depression and anxiety, as the beneficial effects tend to be of a much longer-lasting duration.

A recently published meta-analysis of over 3000 studies suggested that switching antidepressants after the first drug doesn’t produce the desired results is not better than staying the course and/or exploring options other than trying a different drug. This is a very interesting finding as most prescribing clinicians tend to give one antidepressant a “trial” of about 6-12 weeks. If things aren’t better then often scrap that medication and start another 6-12 week trial of another one. The authors of this article reviewed 3234 relevant studies and concluded that it is generally wiser to explore alternatives other than a medication change.

A really interesting study just came out on PLOS One that should be of particular interest to those of us who say they just don’t have enough time to exercise. The study took a bunch of sedentary guys and divided them into three groups: regular exercise, interval training and lazy controls. The guys in the exercise group had to continuously exercise for 50 minutes, the lazy controls did nothing, and the interval training group did three 20-second ‘all-out’ cycle sprints interspersed with two minutes of low speed cycling (just ten minutes of alternating intensities of exercise).

After twelve weeks the researchers noted “that brief intense interval exercise improved indices of cardiometabolic health to the same extent as traditional endurance training in sedentary men, despite a five-fold lower exercise volume and time commitment.”

The American College of Physicians has released a new clinical guideline on the treatment of depression in the Annals of Internal Medicine. They suggested that psychotherapy is as effective for treating depression as antidepressants, and “given its relative lack of potential harms, should be strongly considered as the first-line treatment.” This is consistent with the American Psychiatric Association guidelines on major depressive disorder from 2010, which show therapy and antidepressant medications as being similarly effective.

The two issues that I, personally, have with this are: 1) that the guidelines specifically mention CBT and do not adequately discuss the benefits of other modalities of psychotherapy which may lead health care providers and patients to assume that CBT is the only mode of treatment that is so effective, and 2) the suggestion that psychotherapy has a “relative lack of potential harms.” The word “relative” is key here: psychotherapy has significant fewer potential side effects than medication, but this does not mean that psychotherapy is side effect-free. Therapy can be difficult for many patients at different times along the course of treatment and patients should be aware of this from the outset.

The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) now officially recommends that primary care health clinicians screen all of their patients for depression. Though this is wonderful, this is very, very long overdue. The costs associated with depression and other mental health screen are insignificant relative to the potential gains of “catching” otherwise unrecognized suffering patients. Physicians and other front-line, primary care providers are offered screening guidelines by the AMA via this JAMA article.

Hopefully with more patients being routinely screened, including pregnant and post-partum women – – an often overlooked depressed population, more people will receive quality treatment consisting of psychotherapy and/or antidepressant medications.

I teach a great professional development and clinical consultation class at Loyola University Maryland. Yesterday morning my doctoral students and I had a great discussion about what makes psychotherapy work (among some other very stimulating discussions). This morning I received an email with a link to an article entitled, Revival of psychotherapy? How “talk” therapy changes our brains and genes. This short piece reviews some of the recent literature about the effectiveness of psychotherapy, including referencing statements from the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association. But the article gets even better when it approaches some newer thinking including the possibility that psychotherapy may actually make structural changes in our brains. Scientists have long known that repeated exposures to stimuli (aka, learning) can create new and more efficient neural pathways in the brain. We are now more confidently hypothesizing that the same thing occurs when patients “vent” in therapy… but instead of just venting, what may be happening is that the patient is packaging her thoughts into a narrative that the psychologist can understand, and that in the process of this processing she is starting to think her thoughts differently, to appreciate new facets of her history and to consider alternate perspectives about all this. In other words, she is being exposed to new “stimuli.” And in doing this multiple times (patients often tell the same or similar stories many times over the course of psychotherapy – – and this is a good thing), she may actually be forming new “connections” in her brain and this might be part of why talk therapy does, in fact, work for so many people.

I stumbled upon this brief piece in the Huffington Post about when patients should consider doing psychotherapy, trying medication, doing both at the same time or not doing anything at all. I liked this article because it was short and to the point while giving some nice examples behind the answer to the question: “it depends.”

As a psychologist I have many patients ask for medications and I have many patients refuse my suggestion that they consider medications. I work with only a handful of psychiatrists who I trust, and one of the things that I really like about them is that they don’t always prescribe medication on the first visit and sometimes they don’t prescribe at all. Now days many psychiatrists have defaulted to the role of “prescription mill” and they just see patients on the quarter hour, back to back, writing scripts as quickly as they can. I feel fortunate that I have good relationships with some very thoughtful and knowledgeable psychiatrists.

I also feel fortunate that as a psychologist I have the luxury of time to get to really know my patients, develop a strong therapeutic relationship with them and then help them improve various aspects of their lives. One of my favorite things to do in therapy is to review my clinical notes with a patient when we’re close to terminating treatment. I have found that when people are feeling better they often forget just how bad things were when they first came to me. When we read through the chart together they are reminded of the incredible progress they made.

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I bring decades of experience working in a variety of settings and with a variety of people to my clinical practice. In addition to doing therapy with couples and individuals, I specialize in helping people like you deal with work-related problems.